Great placesare made by passionate people. What's your passion?

We take pride in making places that people love. At our core, Principle exists to plan, design, and build remarkable places. We partner with organizations interested in seeing the strong environmental, economic, and social returns that result from building human-oriented environments. Our work lives at the boundaries of planning, design, architecture, and real estate development to provide design ideas and placemaking solutions that are anchored to the local community and its geography. We strive to deliver unique, practical, effective, and broadly-supported solutions.

We practice:

Planning for ashared future.

We engage with communities directly in their neighborhoods to create visions for the future that can start with real-world improvements today. From dynamic, large-scale comprehensive planning efforts to multi-faceted neighborhood plans, we work with cities and citizens to craft plans that genuinely reflect the character of a place and promote resiliency in an ever-changing world.

Design for thehuman scale.

We leverage the knowledge of whole communities to solve for complex problems and create better design solutions. We collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to bring together local wisdom and timeless design principles to create visionary plans ranging in scale from whole neighborhoods to single rooms.

Real Estate Development with New Urbanist values.

We work to rehabilitate historic buildings and construct new places that add value to their communities using the principles of New Urbanism. Our practice is guided by a commitment to making remarkable buildings and public spaces. Implementing complex urban projects gives our team a unique range of experience in building, financing, and managing the creation of authentic places. These lessons help to inform and improve all of our planning and design work. It challenges us to understand what it takes for plans to become reality.

Community Engagement that is trulyengaging.

At Principle, we understand that local people know more than we do about the places we work. We therefore rely on a process of discovery with a broad range of stakeholders. We strive to build a community around each project to facilitate meaningful interaction with all those involved. Our community engagement campaigns result in honest dialogue, tough problem solving, and consensus-building among even the most diverse groups. By bringing together many points of view, a greater depth of information is created to inform locally-driven planning and design solutions.

Tactical Urbanism, because change can happen in weeks,not years.

We look for opportunities to implement big ideas through short demonstrations and pilot projects. Tactical urbanism is an approach to neighborhood building that uses short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions and policies to catalyze long-term change. These intense efforts provide a hands-on, fast-paced approach to placemaking that can inspire local stakeholders and provide a more clear path toward permanent improvements. Principle has been involved in tactical urbanism since its inception in 2010, and continue to take part in this open source effort.

Form-Based Codes that make great neighborhoods possible.

Form-based codes provide a more predictable tool for achieving a community's long term goals. Principle is committed to developing exceptional form-based codes that enable zoning to work for the needs of the community. Especially in New England, even the most well-intentioned zoning codes remain unnecessarily complex and fail to consistently provide the outcomes desired by the local community. We have created a framework, called PlaceCode, that modernizes form-based coding. Our mission is to make it easier for communities to adopt straightforward land use regulations that go beyond zoning and make it possible—and legal—to build great places.